Spring 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, city and regional planning
Luis A. Martinez's work uses action research and ethnographic methods to understand how and why the brown body has been subjected to an ordering in social space in relation to street-level planning bureaucracies and institutions in New York City. As a Mellon Fellow, Luis will explore representations of the brown body and the aesthetics of displacement, erasure, and resistance in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.
Martinez is director of LDR-Lab (Latino Design and Research Lab) and editor in chief of the journal Práctica. Before coming to Cornell, Martinez worked as a practicing architect, designer, and organizer in the city of Chicago. He earned a bachelor of science in architectural studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure D'Architecture de Versailles, France. During his summers, he enjoys visiting his parent’s hometown of Rioverde, San Luis Potosí Mexico.